Odd Jobs (72 page)

Not that some of these later pieces, tossed off though they feel, are not accomplished; the poet—who wrote many of his letters in perfect verse, it came to him so easily—was also a prolific journalist and an editor. He could do a literary job. “The Favorite,” though it ends on the note of slightly crazed misogyny that lurks like a sinister clown in Apollinaire’s imagination, begins with the sunstruck bluntness of Hemingway or Unamuno, with a symbolist touch:

The stories, generally no longer than three or four pages, are smoothly built about a single idea, and slide quickly toward their shrug of catastrophe. Some—“The Departure of the Shadow,” “The Deified Invalid”—are so Borgesian in tone and form that one wonders if Borges, in his continental sojourn of 1914–21, ran across them. The Borgesian theme of mental simultaneity—of all phenomena concentrating to a single point—occurs several times, and the word “atrocious” in this sentence has the Argentine’s ring: “We were walking along without talking, and, after a while, when I felt the desire to see our shadows again, I saw with a singularly atrocious pleasure [
un plaisir singulièrement atroce
] that Louise’s
had left her.” Sometimes, Apollinaire can think of little to do with his characters but kill them (“The Meeting at the Mixed Club,” “The Eagle Hunt”). His cruel fables have a double face, of Gothic relish and Latin stoicism. Unlike some poets launched into prose, he seems in firm control of his effects. “The Talking Memories,” as a story, is almost slick, with a satisfying “twist” at the end, like a Saki or a Roald Dahl, and “Little Recipes from Modern Magic” could appear in a contemporary humor magazine:

One small story, originally dedicated to his mother and believed to be based upon her reminiscences of the girlhood years she spent in the Roman convent, is a gem of psychologically plausible hallucination: a group of twelve-year-old convent girls hears beyond the walls the sound of a hunter’s horn, and in the following days they all encounter in the corridors a disembodied blue eye, “making a beautiful azure splash in the darkness.” Gradually, they cease to be frightened of it, and coquettishly seek to be seen: “None of us would have wanted to be seen by the blue eye with our hands spotted with ink. Each did her best to look her best when going down the halls.” The convent holds no mirrors, but some of the doors have panes of glass, and “a section of black apron flattened behind the pane formed an improvised mirror, where quick, quick you’d look at yourself, arrange your hair, and ask yourself if you were pretty.” The blue eye slowly disappears from the halls, having been conjured up by a group need and having served to objectify the first intense flash of budding vanity and sexuality in old-fashionedly cloistered females: “You have never seen the blue eye go by, O little girls of today!”

The last story, written in 1916, caps a half-hearted and ragged collection with a startling burst of terrible beauty; only a poet could have written it. “The Case of the Masked Corporal, That Is, the Poet Resuscitated” contains some pictographic verbal arrangements like the shaped poems in
Calligrammes
and also an attempt to round up the characters of the
preceding stories, a hurried grab at unity. Like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, the resuscitated Croniamantal, now a soldier, sees everything at once: “He saw the battlefields of eastern Prussia, of Poland, the quiet of a little Siberian town, fighting in Africa, Anzac, and Sedul-Bar, Salonika, the stripped and terrible oceanic elegance of the trenches in Barren Champagne, the wounded second-lieutenant carried to the ambulance, baseball players in Connecticut, and battles, battles.…” The battlefield is evoked with a passion beyond protest: “And the Front lit up, the hexahedrons were rolling, the steel flowers were blossoming out, the barbed wire was growing thinner with bloody desires, the trenches were opening like females before males.”

Apollinaire had eagerly enlisted. As a foreigner—and one, furthermore, in his mid-thirties—he could have sat the war out in Paris, as did Picasso. His first application to the army, in August 1914, was ignored; he successfully enlisted in Nice, and jubilantly punned, “I so love art that I have joined the artillery.…” Later, he was to leave the relative safety of his artillery unit to become an infantry officer in the front-line trenches. Thus he demonstrated his courage and his loyalty to France, as if these had been in question. His mother, the daughter of a Polish-Russian colonel, approved of his soldiering as of no other aspect of his career. “How beautiful are the rockets that light up the night,” he was to proclaim, in faint echo of “
ta mère une nuit
.” The Italian Futurists, to whom Apollinaire the critic was attracted after cubism, had a theoretical thirst for violence; though he once wrote, “
Ah Dieu que la guerre est jolie
,” the letters he poured out as a “
soldat de la douce France
” show him shedding whatever naïve illusions he held concerning “the simple horror of the trenches.” Yet his war injury, in its fictional rendering, is ennobled by a myth: “The corporal in the blind mask was smiling amorously at the future, when a fragment of a high caliber shell hit him in the head, from which sprang, like pure blood, a triumphant Minerva. Stand up, everybody, to give a courteous welcome to victory!”
^*
Croniamantal has gone
from being torn Orpheus to fruitful Jupiter; Apollinaire, who was never quite himself after his head wound, and who weakly succumbed to disease a few years later, has among his laurels a claim to being the last poet to write of war as a theatre of glory.

B
ETWEEN
F
ANTOINE AND
A
GAPA
, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 83 pp. Red Dust, 1982.

T
HAT
V
OICE
, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 114 pp. Red Dust, 1982.

The brave little publishing house called Red Dust, which operates out of a postal box at Gracie Station, keeps issuing, along with the new poetry from Peru and other such bulletins from the scattered legions of the avant-garde, the works of the esteemed contemporary French novelist Robert Pinget. Recently published, in translations by the indispensable Barbara Wright, are Pinget’s first prose work,
Between Fantoine and Agapa
, and a novel from 1980,
That Voice
. What can one say of Pinget, as he comes through in Ms. Wright’s loving translations, except that he conveys, amid much willful murk, an impression of integrity, intelligence, and power? He is a dark author, placidly settled amid his favorite village odors of damp stone and rotting wood (anybody who has stepped into an old French farmhouse will recognize the aroma), and mysteriously content to churn and rechurn the chronic garbled rumors of perversion and homicide that make up his plots, if he can be said to have plots. This reviewer had hoped that a consecutive reading of a work Pinget produced in 1951 and one published in 1980 would clarify what the author has been “up to”; and indeed certain differences in texture and machination are apparent. But it cannot be said that Pinget began as anything but oddly, opaquely himself; his surrealism has been constant, though its field of operation has become more rural and, as it were, medieval and hellish.

One might suppose
Between Fantoine and Agapa
to have a certain geographical
focus and to lay claim to the imaginary territory of provincial France where the later fictions—preëminently,
The Inquisitory
, still Pinget’s most impressive and cogent work—more or less take place. Alas, one is fooled again, for the little book is a collection of disconnected pranks, or prose poems, which take place not so much between Fantoine and Agapa as between Pinget’s ears. The first chapter, or sketch, or whatever, “Vishnu Takes His Revenge,” deals with the curé of Fantoine, who is bored. “He subscribes to theater magazines. He dips into the fashionable authors. He gleans in learned vineyards. He passes for a scholar, but he’s a rotter.” His parishioners don’t provide much amusement for him: “The inhabitants of Fantoine are hopeless. They drink. They work. They drink. Their children are epileptic, their wives pregnant.” But, then, “luckily, someone from Agapa-la-Ville takes an interest in him and sends a book on Cambodia.” The curé grows interested; he teaches himself the Khmer language; he thinks all day of the ancient temples and sees royal dancing girls in the local population. “The forest of Fantoine becomes populated with yak demons, with Mrinh Kangveal spirits, with Banra trees. Paddy-fields cover the country.” Saying mass, he mistakenly intones, “Hic est enim corpus Yak”; and a gigantic demon “sprang out of the Host, dispatched the curé, and pulverized the church. And Vishnu the Eternal deigned to smile.” In the title story, “Between Fantoine and Agapa,” a man, his wife, and their child prepare to picnic between these two fictional towns when a sign in a field proclaims, “Alopecia-impetrating [patchy-baldness-obtaining-by-entreaty] prohibited”; this makes them so frightened they skip lunch. Later that night, the child vomits jam and the wife’s hair stands on end. “But not for long, because half an hour later she was as bald as a coot.” But for these two tales, there is no mention of Fantoine or Agapa, and the subject matter gravitates toward the mythic and the facetiously geographic—episodes take place in Manhattan, Menseck, the Forest of Grance, and Florence, and characters include Don Quixote, a parrot called Methuselah, Aeschylus and his maidservant Aglaia, and the Persian King Artaxerxes. As he roams through these prankish fancies, the young Pinget reminds us of various comrades in surrealism. Of Alfred Jarry and his frenzies of mechanical precision:

Of William Burroughs and his gleeful wars and plagues:

Pinget also shows something of the antic sunniness of Raymond Queneau and of Beckett’s clownish desolation. His playful dabbling with history and myth suggests a host of experimental modernists, from Borges to Barth, from the
Fabrications
of the late Michael Ayrton to the
Eclogues
of our contemporary Guy Davenport. Literary experiment and surrealism have certain natural channels into which to run, it would appear, not so unlike the well-worn grooves of realism; nonsense, being an inversion of sense, is condemned to share a certain structure with it, and a finitude of forms. Pinget, even in this early, rather frolicsome and eclectic work, does look forward to what is to become his mature tone. The last and longest piece in
Between Fantoine and Agapa
is titled “Journal,” and, though concerned with such absurdities as snowstorms of fingernail clippings and dwarfs sold at auction to be used as candelabra by religious communities, it foreshadows the sinister cruelty and gloom of the later work. An inbred, joyless, cannibalistic sexuality is a recurrent theme in Pinget, and occurs here: “They mate among themselves, without the slightest desire, and give birth to edible daughters who are a kind of saprophyte.” A dreamlike restlessness in the forms of things makes itself felt with a shudder: “Their agricultural work is backbreaking. They … tread down the excrescences that tend to form on the fences. I tried this, with the help of a peasant. But just as I was making an oblique movement over the unexposed part I let go my hold, the excrescence came and knocked on my foot, and the man only just had time to push me back out of the way.” Pinget’s preoccupation with the menace of the organic and with the Stygian stirrings of the dead emerges side by side with characteristic flashes of aesthetic theory: “In a work of art we do not try to conjure up
beauty or truth. We only have recourse to them—as to a subterfuge—in order to be able to go on breathing.” And the prose, though indeterminate in its significations, is chiselled in its cadences—so deliberate in its bewildering effects that the intimidated reader, coming upon alphabetical formations like “This has been goi
QHQfor so long” and “hnd he passes the laundry again,” doubts whether he is in the presence of a misprint or of an especially refined, albeit obscure, intention.